We really ought to be nicer to our bus monitors

I should probably put a disclaimer on that. Not all kids are terrible. Specifically, my kid is not terrible. Also, your kids are not terrible, you, the specific person who is reading this right now. But everybody else’s kids? Obnoxious little hell beasts.

You know I’m right. You’ve seen the MTV.

But if you weren’t already convinced of this fact by your personal experiences at the mall or at your kid’s school or television or movies or the Internet or remembering your own childhood or just not being in a vegetative coma right now, this video is another helpful reminder of what depraved animals little kids are capable of being.

WARNING: If you watch this video, I cannot guarantee that you won’t walk out of your door and walk down the street until you come upon the nearest teenager and clothesline the living crap out of them.

Actually, I realize it’s too late at this point, what with you currently in the midst of a group of 12-year-old children wildly throwing punches, but don’t watch that. It is infuriating and will only increase your blood pressure. You don’t need to be reminded how terrible human beings are. You know already. Go back in time and tackle your past self before he or she can watch that video I just showed you. You’ll be the better for it.

That lady in the video you watched and then unwatched is named Karen Klein. She’s a bus monitor in upstate New York, which I guess is a concept that I am wholly unfamiliar with. Bus monitors? We didn’t have bus monitors when I was a kid. If we, the children riding the school bus, chose to garrote the bus driver before he could deliver us to the school, there was nobody to stop us. But we never thought of doing that because we weren’t deranged little monsters.

Not so these days, when we have to hire kindly, 70-year-old ladies like Karen Klein for $17,000 a year to keep the mob of children from assembling into an unstoppable murder force. Which seems to make the kids angry, that they are prevented from doing terrible, unsupervised things on the back of the bus that the bus driver is helpless to prevent, so they compensate by being the worst possible kinds of human beings on earth to defenseless old ladies. And then they put it up on the Internet.

To this point, the drive has raised nearly $500,000, which is an amount so high as to make you wonder if any of this is legitimate or if the next stage in humiliating this poor old woman is teasing her with a half-million dollars that she’ll never receive. If this is legit, I hope she uses her newfound wealth to retire. Another second spent putting up with the crap of America’s next crop of Dane Cooks is one second too many.

But just because these kids are, needless to say, psychopathic little bastards does not necessarily mean that that’s how they want the world at large to see them. Which is why two of the four little creeps in the video have now issued apologies. But not just any kind of apologies! Written apologies! The best kind of apology of all, because in writing nobody can hear you being insincere.

One of the students, who we will call Josh, although in our hearts his name will always be Buttface, said “I am so sorry for the way that I treated you. When I saw the video I was disgusted and could not believe I did that. I am sorry for being so mean and I will never treat anyone this way again.”

Another student, identified as Wesley but who is secretly named El Crappo, penned a note that read, “I feel really bad about what I did. I wish I had never done those things. If that had happened to someone in my family, like my mother or grandmother, I would be really mad at the people who did that to them.”

Just stop. Please.

Whereas the taunts in the video are themselves infuriating enough, this load of crap now being peddled is somehow even worse.

Show of hands - who thinks these kids are legitimately sorry for how they acted?

Now, how many think they’re sorry for having been exposed for doing what they did?

What they’re really sorry about is that 4chan is currently in the midst of making their lives a living hell with phone calls and death threats and hoax hostage threats, which is admittedly just as uncool as what these kids did, if not more so. Yes, these kids are immoral little pukes, but they are also kids and you are supposed to be an adult, which is why you should not be sending them threats or calling them at their homes or writing 1,000-word blog posts calling them cretins and pukes and bastards and … um, oops.

Anyway, Karen Klein is now a half-a-millionaire and doing interviews with everyone who owns a camera. She seems like a nice enough woman who really doesn’t deserve any of this, either the mockery on the bus or the whirlwind of attention now being forced upon here. So maybe instead of donating money or putting this lady or the kids through the wringer, what we all really ought to do is internalize this experience and look within ourselves to see if we are capable of being as depraved and horrible to those we perceive as being our inferiors in our own behaviors, either now or in the past, and if so, to somehow find a way to correct that.

Or, if you find out it’s your own kid doing this, do us all a favor and ground them until infinity. One less punk for the rest of us.

Bismarck resident Erik Hagen is the author of the SodBlog and hoping someone will start raising money for all the crap he had to put up with high school sometime soon. Send your forced apologies to SodBlog@me.com or visit his website at sodblog.com.